- cross-posted to:
- esperanto@sopuli.xyz
- interessant@jlai.lu
cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/9070854
Geoguessr players: Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power
as a geoguessr player this is actually very helpful and i sent it to our group chat
This is awesome! Never occurred to me that you can tell languages (whose writing systems are similar to each other) apart just by analyzing its graphemes while ignoring grammar entirely
I dunno it’s all Greek to me mate
Ah yes, of course, I am familiar with the endonyms of all these uncommon languages and their (not always unique) associated flags.
That’s like half the fun, trying to figure out what the languages might be, based on the other languages near them and just guessing what those letters might be in English or whatever other languages you know.
But yes, it absolutely is difficult, especially with many regions being demarked, which I’ve probably never heard of.
I don’t know who they are but I like Frysk’s flag.
Frisia! It’s a province of the Netherlands and I think their language is the closest one to English
Closest to Anglic languages (English, Scots & I think some creoles?) in terms of ancestry - I think Danish is actually the closest to English due to the influence of old norse on English though? Or it could just be coincidence in how they evolved?, and part of the Anglo-Frisian family which means it’s pretty closely related
If you like the West Frisian flag wait until you see North Frisia’s coat of arms. That’s a pot of (red?) grit there, and the motto is “Better dead than slave”. Just don’t try to conquer them and they’re perfectly pleasant to be around with and share a state with, rather cooking grit than looking for trouble. (Not identical to the coat of the district of Nordfriesland, that’s quite a bit more territory than North Frisia proper).
The heart shaped figures you are seeing, actually depict leaves of waterlilies.
Maybe if Low Saxon could finally agree on an orthography we could be in that chart. It’s currently split between “Use Dutch orthography”, which doesn’t work, “use German orthography”, which doesn’t work, and I guess “use English orthography”, which also doesn’t work. Technically there should also be a Cyrillic version and who knows with as big as the Diaspora is there’s probably a Portuguese version in Brazil.
I’m in. Take my upvote!
I enjoy how there’s a language called “iron”.
Its a solid language, but im a bit rusty with it.
Sorry, im leaving.
I kinda broke it with å
what does “b G R v” mean
“Am I seeing those in what I reading”.
French is a strange one here - they have “w” (double vé in the alphabet) but it’s used almost exclusively in loan words. So I’m not certain it’s determinative the way it’s presented here.
I think that choice is more about “ieuw” as a whole, like “nieuw” in Dutch, not the separate 4 letters (like b G R v at the beginning)
Why is “ø y” a no for Denmark, but a yes for Norway? I’m pretty sure both countries have the same alphabet?
it’s not “ø”, “y”, it’s “øy” in combination (as a digraph?)
same as “th” further down not implying the N languages don’t have “t” or “h”, just that they don’t have “th”
Aha thanks for the explanation.
The “øy” is written without a space between the letters, which seems to mean that these letters occur together in words (more obvious example: “eau” leads into French).
The problem is that we can put words together to form new words. So say I produced a yogurt at a lake(sø) , I could call it søyougurt. It’s not a word that would be in a dictionary though, but lots of that kind of words aren’t.
Maybe within one syllable then?
I mean, I’m not looking to defend this diagram, I have no idea if it’s correct. And frankly I would be surprised if it is anything more than an approximation, since language is always messy.
Geoguessr pros have this memorized I assume
Thankfully, European countries are only a few kilometers across, so even if you just eyeball it, it’s usually not too far off.
You have never seen professional geoguessr players. Consider yourself lucky, its amazing to watch them for the first time. I can recommend the youtubers rainbolt, zigzag or geowizard as an oldschool player.
As a german, I feel the right side is much more alien to me than the left side (split at “Start here”).
Is that circumstancial, or does it reflect some linguistic truth? Like, are the languages on the left one family, and the ones on the right another family, or however linguistic taxonomy would call that?
Maybe it’s just that the left side includes all the germanic languages, so that feels more familiar. There are also languages on the left side where I have no clue what or where that might be. But much more so on the right side.
Like yeah, the first split is about having a number of common letters from the Latin alphabet, so the right side is everything else: Cyrillic, Hebrew, …
Indeed, but most of the flags here represent the regions they are spoken in.
Corse, Sardinia, Brittany, Occitania are not countries
Interesting, thanks.
The swedish one is incorrect. It’s ä and ö not æ and ø.
Swedish is on the “no” branch of those letters
